The freight handling vehicle of the invention is especially designed to expedite the transporting and loading and unloading of cargo containers in conjunction with wide-body jet aircraft in this country which presently consist of the Boeing 747, the McDonald-Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011. These planes are still being freight-loaded with equipment of the type which has been used for years to load the 707 and DC-8 jet aircraft. The inevitable trend is toward utilization of the wide-body jet aircraft to carry freight and passengers at the same time. With the presently known freight handling and loading equipment, LD-3 and LD-7 type cargo containers are loaded in the cargo plane areas of large airports, transported by slow trailer train carriers to the passenger areas which are frequently located at substantial distances from the cargo plane areas, and loaded into the aircraft slowly through the use of conventional airline support equipment. With this old type of freight handling equipment, it takes about one-half hour at the San Francisco airport to load a Boeing 747 passenger-freight jet aircraft at the passenger terminal with its full load of allotted freight, a job which takes the subject freight handling vehicles about ten minutes.
The present transporter/loader is a large scale vehicle of about 50 feet in length, 16 feet or so in width, and having a highway speed of 25 mph or more. One such unit can hold 16 LD-3 units. Two of these transporter/loaders can entirely load a forward and rear freight compartment of a 747 with a substantial saving in aircraft loading time.